Nico Schottelius/ docs/ Simple Universal Time (SUT)

Introduction

This article describes a simple solution to the problem of having to care about time zones, clock adjusting due to summer and winter time changes. It also addresses the problematic to of non-metric conversion when used with other units.

Simple Universal Time (SUT)
is suited for instant implementation and does not interfer with any current time system.

Motivation

The life of individuals becomes more and more global:

  • Communication takes place covering several time zones
  • Travelling accross multiple time zones has become normal

Due to this change, people are more and more confronted to think about the time in different time zones.

To place a call, you have to find out

  • in which time zone the target person is
  • how much offset to UTC this particular time zone has
  • remember the delta from my time zone to UTC
  • create the delta from both time zones
  • find a good time for a call

This is quite cumbersome and wastes a lot of energy world wide, every day.

Furthermore, changes from summer time to winter time zone make this process even harder: If you remember the offset for a particular location, the time zone may have changed due to summer time changes...

There is another problem with the current time scheme: that is being non-metric. Having scientific calculations with all metric units is usually broken up due to the non-metric behaviour of time. This is simply unecessary and can be easily fixed as the following proposal will show.

Proposal

To simplify this time disaster, the following two changes are proposed for change:

* Convert the time of day to a metric system
* Drop all time zones and only use SUT

Conversion to metric

For a simple start, assume there is no time definition and that we can start from scratch. Assume:

  • A day has 10 hours
  • An hour has 100 minutes
  • A minutes has 100 seconds

This would create a day that has 10 * 100 * 100 = 100000 seconds.

The old scheme used to have 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute, which resulted in 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400 seconds.

Let us prefix the new definition with the word simple to be able to distinguish between the two schemes and let us convert them into another:

100000 simple seconds = 86400 seconds # divide by 100000
1 simple second = 0.864 seconds

Or the other way around:

86400 seconds = 100000 simple seconds # divide by 86400
1 second = 1.157407 (periodical, rounded)

So having the seconds calculated, we can also compare the minutes and hours:

1 simple minute = 100 simple seconds => 86.4 seconds = 1 minute 26.4 seconds
1 simple hour = 10000 simple seconds => 8640 seconds = 144 minutes = 2h 24 minutes

And the other way round:

1 minute = 60 seconds => 69.4 simple seconds (not one simple minute!)
1 hour = 3600 seconds => 4166.67 simple seconds = 41.6667 simple minutes = 0.4167 simple hours

Drop all time zones

To be able to have one global time that everybody can use without the need of calculations, there won't be any time zones defined for use with SUT. Instead, SUT is based on UTC.

Time format

As SUT only includes 10 hours, you can display time of the day using the following format:

H:MM:SS

where H is in the range of 0-9, MM in the range of 00-99 and SS in the range of 00-99.

Implications for Society

When changing to SUT, societies productivity will improve pretty fast. If a particular society wants to keep the unclear advantage of summe time, it can even do so by using SUT:

Instead of changing the time, this society can announce that all shops open up earlier in summer and open up later in winter time. Beware: An actual advantage of using summer time for a society using summer time of one that doesn't has not been proven.

Using SUT

You can start right away to use SUT in your daily work.

Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis created a javascript implementation of SUT, so you can easily see the current time. It is hosted at http://telmich.github.io/sut

Future and Related Work

Parts of the SUT proposal are also covered by the Decimal Time, which has been used in France around 1792.

As societies are adopting more and supporting utilities will be created. You are advised to open source them and add them to the sut git repository.

SUT is the new standard to replace timezones, summer time changes and the 24 hour day.